Pixar wannabes: NVIDIA has four new budget Quadro cards for you

NVIDIA recently introduced four new boards to its Quadro line of video cards: the Quadro FX 370, Quadro NVS 290, Quadro FX 570, and the Quadro FX 1700. The Quadro line of graphics cards are aimed at professionals that work with CAD, digital content creation, and imaging. In other words, they're for medical imaging professionals and the fine people that brought us movies like Shrek and Barnyard.

The latest cards, which all offer Shader Model 4.0 support, were introduced so that professionals on a budget could still keep up to speed with changing 2D and 3D technologies. The previous leader in the Quadro FX entry-level product line was the FX 560, which offered 128MB of RAM and 19.2GB/sec graphic memory bandwidth. The new FX 570 bumps the memory an additional 128MB to 256MB, but throttles down on graphic memory bandwidth to 12.8GB/sec. The low-end Quadro FX 350, unlike the other cards, uses PCI Express and does not require PCI Express x16.

All of the cards are Vista ready and support NVIDIA CUDA technology which "extends the functionality of the GPU to address a wide range of mathematically intensive problems." The CUDA C programming language and toolset are both included in the purchase of a card. Here's a brief rundown of the specs: